| #5: The Predator |
Detailed Plot: Marco rescues an old man from thugs by morphing into a gorilla, but finds it to be a thankless task. He discusses vigilantism with the other Animorphs and finds that everyone's got a different opinion. Then they discuss their newest member, the Andalite Ax, and because he wants to go home to the Andalite world, they are thinking about stealing a Yeerk spaceship to make the trip possible. The group decides to go to the mall with Ax to get parts to make a communicator to call down a Yeerk ship, but in the process Ax in his human morph gets distracted by his first experiences with his sense of taste. As an Andalite, he doesn't normally have a mouth, so temporarily being a human and getting to enjoy the taste of food and coffee is overwhelming to him. They manage to find all the parts for a communicator except for a Z-Space transponder, but the mall adventure ends in disaster when he can't control himself while eating cinnamon buns, and mall cops crack down. He tries to run away but isn't coordinated enough to do so with his two human legs, and unwisely begins to morph back to an Andalite in public. One of the mall cops shows himself to be a Controller by recognizing the Andalite, and Ax gets away by fighting with his scorpion-like tail. Jake and Marco chase him as they try to escape, but the police begin to surround them and chase them into a grocery store, where they acquire lobster morphs so they can hide out in the seafood tank. Their plan works pretty well except that they're pretty disoriented by the lobster morph, and it's hard for them to figure out what's happening until it's almost too late: they've been taken to a cooking pot and nearly ended up boiled alive. They have no choice but to escape by demorphing, scaring the crap out of the poor woman who'd bought them for dinner. (They calmly tell her she was having a dream and leave the house.) Marco has a nightmare about being a lobster, only to wake up and mistake his dad for his mom. His father is shown to be still very sorrowful over the fact that his mother's no longer with them. When the group's next plan involves morphing into ants to steal a Z-Space transponder from Chapman's basement, Marco gets frustrated because Jake doesn't seem to understand how important it is that he not turn up dead when his dad is handling his mother's being gone so poorly. Still, they're worried that Ax is going to be discovered and connected with Cassie since he is on her farm, and that would mean trouble for everyone. Marco decides to go ahead with the ant mission when he thinks about Ax (and his dead brother) being casualties of a war that has THEIR parents forever wondering what's become of them. He wants to help Ax get home so their family won't be in the same situation as his. The Animorphs go into their ant morphs and have a terrifying experience of losing their identities. Because ant minds are part of a collective and they really have no sense of self, each of them is temporarily lost in the chemical instructions and commands of being an ant, and instead of completing their mission they're much more focused on getting a dead beetle and avoiding enemies. Tobias is watching them and trying to snap them out of it by using thought-speak, and when they finally come back to themselves they're horrified by what it was like to be a social insect. However, even though Tobias thinks they should abandon the morph, Rachel wants to finish the mission, so they try to get into Chapman's house. The group manages to find the Z-Space transponder they wanted, and they shrink back down to ants and carry the pea-sized piece of technology back out the way they came. But disaster strikes when they meet another group of ants--the enemy--and they have no choice but to fight. But because they're outnumbered, they start getting dismembered and bitten and ripped apart. The only way out is to morph back to human to escape being killed, which they do and have to climb out of the dirt. After this experience, Marco is disturbed to find the head of the ant that was trying to bite him in half still attached to his midsection. . . . The stress of almost being killed gets to everyone. Rachel starts a fight in the lunchroom with some girl who bumped into her, and Marco gets caught up in it, only to get sent to the principal's office with the girls. He jokes that they were fighting over him. This impresses Rachel--the fact that Marco can still hold onto his sense of humor in the face of all this--and she compliments his strength. While planning the next stage of the mission for Ax to bait a Yeerk ship, Marco tells Jake this will be his last mission because it's been too many close calls. Jake is understanding. They get a bird morph for Ax and the group all flies out to a rock quarry so that if the Yeerks respond it will be in a remote location not connected with anyone they know. And the communicator seems to work as planned because a Bug ship does arrive, but just as they're about to take out the crew and steal the ship for Ax, a whole army of Hork-Bajir reveal that the place is surrounded, and Visser Three shows up, announcing that Visser One is approaching to see the Andalite bandits. Ax is enraged at seeing the stolen Andalite body being used by Visser Three, but Jake forbids Ax to communicate with him. The Animorphs, still in animal morph, are forced onto the Yeerk ship and locked in a room. There they see Earth through the window, from space, and they await their fate, discussing their options without much hope. Marco worries about how he'll die in his gorilla morph and there won't even be a body, just like when his mother disappeared in a boating accident. The armies of the Vissers Three and One are lined up outside their cell, and they begin welcoming the senior Visser. When Marco sees who it is, he realizes that this may change the game. Visser One is a human-Controller. And its host is Marco's mother. Jake is the only Animorph besides Marco who recognizes her, so he thought-speaks privately to Marco and demands that he not give any clues away that he is connected to the Visser's host. Marco can't help but be stunned and a bit excited that his mother isn't dead (while of course being horrified that she is enslaved). The group watches the interplay between Visser One and Visser Three, noticing that they appear to be rivals and that Visser Three has made many mistakes that Visser One mocks. After some bickering, the Animorphs are led to a holding cell and they discuss their possibilities. But before they can execute turning into ants or doing anything else, a group of Visser One's soldiers arrives, tells them how to escape, and lets them out. They give no explanation, but the Animorphs realize they're being freed so Visser Three will look bad. But despite their release being executed purely for political reasons, they're willing to take it. The group escapes down a drop shaft and gets out of the mess in time to not be stuck in their morphs, and Jake promises Marco that the others won't be told about his mother. Marco and his father visit his mother's grave and discuss their lives since she left. His dad says his wife wouldn't have wanted to see him the way he's been, and he's decided to try to get his old job back and try to have a life again. Things are looking up, but Marco is still thinking about his mother enslaved by a Yeerk running the empire, and he's definitely staying in the fight now.
Narrator: Marco New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Black ant Marco: Lobster, black ant Rachel: Black ant Ax: Lobster, black ant, northern harrier Notable: Andalites communicate through thought-speak, and it's easy to imagine that it wouldn't necessarily need to be a particular language to succeed in communicating with alien species. But it does seem odd that when Ax is in human morph, he appears to just know the language (even though he's prone to playing with sounds when he speaks). It doesn't appear that particular knowledge should come with a human brain when an alien uses one as a morph, so it's unclear how he speaks English. Marco regularly refers to his mother as "dead" in this book even though it's been established that she actually just disappeared and is presumed dead. That helps make his mother's appearance much more unexpected than it might have been otherwise. While dealing with the lobster morph, Jake makes use of Ax's ability to keep time independently of using a watch for the first time. Ax is shown to be able to accurately gauge how much time they've spent in morph, which is a handy talent for their future missions. In this book Marco finally has a very personal reason to keep fighting instead of a very personal reason to back out of the fight. He also seems to be beginning to realize that his sense of humor does indicate a type of strength, even though he is also unrepentant about being cowardly sometimes. Since the Animorphs continue to avoid revealing their true last names in the books for fear that the Yeerks will use the information to find them, it seems ridiculous that they could point out a biological relationship between Visser One and Marco. Obviously, Visser One knows who her son is. Which would mean that any Yeerk on Visser One's side could find him immediately. It would have been better for the books to not break the fourth wall and pretend they're talking to people who are in the same universe as they are. Best lines: Marco: I'm not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not even average height for my age, though I make up for it by being incredibly cute. And charming. And witty. And modest. Jake: "Marco doesn't believe in optimism." Marco: "Two years since my mom died. And I don't know what to do. I don't know whether I should talk to my dad about it, or just let it pass. But I know one thing--this would be a really bad week for me to turn up dead." Marco: Sometimes I really hate having a conscience.
Cassie: "I wonder why these people moved?" Rachel: "You grind my nerves sometimes, Marco, always joking the way you do. But keep it up, okay? We need a sense of humor."
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